Tales of the Walking Dead is just one of many The Walking Dead spinoffs coming to AMC. The first episode of the post-apocalyptic anthology series is set to drop on August 14, 2022, with each standalone episode following a new character…with the exception of one familiar character we know well from The Walking Dead.
Showrunner and executive producer Channing Powell and The Walking Dead Universe’s Chief Content Officer Scott Gimple, along with cast members Terry Crews (“Joe”), Danny Ramirez (“Eric”), and Samantha Morton (“Alpha”), came to this year’s San Diego Comic-Con and participated in a press conference, providing the scoop on what audiences can expect from the six-episode season.
How will the series be structured and what kind of stories will we see?
Channing Powell: “Everyone else is new and will be a new introduction to the world and to the audience, so you can not have ever watched The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead and start this series knowing everything you need to know, really. And it was really fun. We got to create these characters in the writer’s room and Scott had already had some ideas going into it, so everybody except for Alpha is brand new.”
Scott Gimple: “Structure-wise, it’s an anthology so every episode is its own little story from beginning to end.”
Was the aim to do a Tales from the Crypt-style anthology in the sense that you could explore different genres and tones with the episodes? Will we get an animated episode or a musical episode down the line?
Scott Gimple: “Oh man, the reason Channing is looking at me is that we both had aspirations for those musical and animation [episodes]. Channing had more musical and I had more animation, but we both lost.
The big thing with this show is the variety. You know, Tales from the Crypt is fairly consistent in tone. This all around has different tones and it really offers the audience an incredible amount of variety.”
Channing Powell: “I agree. I was dying to do a musical and might have written a script; there may be something out there. But I think some of them were so different that we kind of wanted to see how much we could push the boundaries within the world and the tone and how much it would still feel like The Walking Dead and please the fans of the original show and also new fans.
We’ve got plans for some crazy things, but I think at the heart of it they are still – even though they are tonally very different and that was the goal…we wanted it to feel like six different pilots or six different movies…the heart of it is still The Walking Dead and the desire to survive and the need to survive.”
Terry and Danny, these characters are brand new, and because the format is an anthology and you only have one hour to have a full character arc, do you guys feel like you accomplished that? Do you really feel like your character has changed from frame one to the end of the episode?
Terry Crews: “I think you can do a lot in an hour; I had a character arc in an Old Spice commercial. You got to hit it, you know what I mean? This is what is so brilliant about what this world is, and the big thing is that we know what this world is. We’ve spent at least 10 years with this world. But what I also like to compare this to is a song. It’s like ‘I Will Always Love You’ by Dolly Parton is way different than ‘I Will Always Love You’ by Whitney Houston.
When you bring the elements that are here into this world, it becomes a brand-new thing. We already did it with the original cast and even with Fear (the Walking Dead) but with this, it’s like what are the possibilities? And this is a brilliant thing that Scott and Channing put together along with all this wonderful crew was like, ‘Wow, what if these worlds and these places [exist]?’ because it is a world.
I could not be more honored to be able to sing this song like this. I’ll tell you, it’s something that I needed for my career, for my lifeblood as an actor, as an artist, because I talk about a lot of very serious subjects a lot. I can break into being funny to writing books about abuse and life, and this is the part I always wanted to show people. Always. And I’m thankful for this opportunity.”
Danny Ramirez: “I don’t have a metaphorical song, but I agree that it’s the ‘what if?’ We know what this world was and has been for so long, and the idea of having an hour to portray someone that’s surviving was just always a fascinating challenge to take on just because in the first place surviving is the biggest challenge of your life. And so I think this idea of an arc in an hour really is enough time.
There’s something about Eric that I love playing, which was sometimes when you meet people, they’re not in a place to change. They don’t have to drastically change too much and it being such a human story – without spoiling too much of the episode – I think there are the places where we were just able to dial a little bit and not necessarily have this massive arc or a change specifically, but rather just hold a mirror to how a couple could be experiencing this moment of survival. To me, it was just like a fascinating challenge to take on.”
How did you prepare yourself both emotionally and mentally for this role?
Terry Crews: “First of all, I went into my past. I grew up in Flint, Michigan. I grew up in the ‘80s and I watched the city go from a vibrant, beautiful, wonderful, and amazing town when General Motors was the number one corporation in the world, and I watched it die – and I mean overnight. And it was the walking dead. Not only did the auto industry die, the rise of crime rate and the gangs took over. It became a hollowed-out shell of a city right before my eyes. I mean, within a six-year period. From 1980 to 1986 everything changed, and I was like, ‘What am I in?’
It took me this quick [snapping his fingers] to get right into this world because one day it was wonderful for all and the next day it was all over. That was where I tapped into.
This is another thing, too, is that people started to attack each other. It’s a lot of what I’ve seen in America right now. A lot of people are going through hard times when the pandemic hit. Instead of battling and joining together and battling this problem, it became about attacking each other. When I look at the common themes of this show, it’s really about who we trust, who may betray you. […] I felt when I got on the set, I was ready.”
Samantha Morton: “Lovely question from an actor’s perspective – that’s a great question. I’ve never played Dee before, so I play who Alpha is before she’s Alpha and I’ve never done that character before. It was really hard trying to get the tone right in regards to there’s something underneath her anyway and how is that going to manifest and when will that manifest. It’s dialing in the right sounds at the right time.
I think also it’s about the writing and we got so lucky with this anthology. We have the best writers ever. […] I think that with Channing it was about making sure that I fully, fully understood the intentions. And when I was on The Walking Dead, I may have had to do [method acting]. I had to. I really had to play her. I didn’t know whether those things were right or wrong, but I had to do it because I had to talk to a voice coach and I had to find the voice and the walk and the breath and the music she liked. That’s your job as an actor to do that anyway, but I was fortunate enough to work with Channing and the other writers. You get a lot of support.”
Channing Powell: “I’ve been saying the five other episodes are new characters that you’ve never met before, but that’s a disservice to your performance [to Samantha] because Dee is somebody they’ve never met before. And I keep saying you’ll recognize Alpha but really it is a new character, actually.”
Danny Ramirez: “For me, preparation for it…I was reading this book called Endure which [wants you to take] the limitations of what your body could go through and really crank up the heat of what you have to have to tap into yourself in order to survive. That’s really what I was fascinated about.
And also, I had to push myself physically and eat super clean. It allowed me to live off just clean chicken and lettuce and doing that leading up to it and through it. And waking up even earlier and shooting long hours and just doing that for 11 days, by the end of it and through it, I was exhausted. And I think that tapped into these moments where I told myself to just breathe. That breath says so much about what somebody is.”
Now that you’ve seen Alpha’s backstory, do you believe the audience will still view her as a villain?
Samantha Morton: “She did not start the war; my people were killed first. It was retaliation. But I think the story needs a balance and someone has to play that narrative, that strong, that hard, for the show to work.
It’s also kind of the perspective of the cinematography, how they shoot a scene, and how the music is used. It’s really fascinating to go back and go, ‘Let’s look at it from that perspective.’
Personally, to get to do that is a gift. It’s like, ‘Wow, who gets to do that?’ It’s like all your Christmases at once.
I also think for the Alpha stuff, she was pushed to a certain extent. She was the leader of an army and sometimes you have to make really bad decisions, thinking about the future as opposed to the present. She was making decisions for the future, not the present if that makes sense, and it kind of didn’t work out for her.”
How did you whittle down the ideas for the standalone episodes? Can you mention some of the other ideas that didn’t make the cut?
Channing Powell: “Well, nothing’s dead in my heart or soul or in my mind. But it was hard to whittle it down. It was a lot of factors. There’s Scott’s favorite episodes; there’s my favorite episodes versus how different are the stories that we are telling. Are we catering enough to the original fans but also providing enough of something different to bring new people in? You know, how much is the episode? [Laughing] And possibly my musical episode might have been a little expensive.”
Scott Gimple: “Production on this show was incredibly challenging because, again, all those different worlds. Like, for The Walking Dead we were at a prison for 16 or so episodes. You know where you are going to work in the morning. This was just a massive challenge.”
Channing Powell: “Yeah, we had to build new sets for every episode. It was difficult. There was really a large number of factors that brought it to these six.”
These are obviously six distinct, different standalone episodes. But do you have plans or is there some common story element that ties them together in the future?
Channing Powell: “I am just particularly interested in figuring out who someone really is at their core. You can present yourself in a certain way, you can live your life in a certain way, you can make as many plans as you want, but when it’s the end of the world, who are you really? Who’s showing up to survive that day? And I think almost every episode puts every character in that situation of making them examine how they’ve been living their lives and how they want to go forward – the person they want to be going forward.
That was really compelling to me, especially when the pandemic hit because I think we were expected to know how to handle things. But day one, I was like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on! Who am I?’ That was just really fascinating to me, and I wanted to see these characters deal with that.”
- Tales of the Walking Dead Season 1 Episode 1 Recap
- Tales of the Walking Dead Season 1 Episode 2 “Blair/Gina” Recap
- Tales of the Walking Dead Season 1 Episode 3 “Dee” Recap
